Hispanics in Texas

Hispanics in Texas - Whites who dominated Texas’s population for generations are growing older and more dependent on the earning power and taxes of younger Hispanics, now poised to take over as the state’s largest demographic group.

Of the 25,145,561 people counted in Texas in the 2010 Census, 37.6 percent were Hispanic and 45.3 percent were non- Hispanic whites. Yet Hispanics disproportionately fill the ranks of younger Texans. Hispanics comprise 48.3 percent of Texans under the age of 18, up from 40.5 percent in 2000. The percentage of non-Hispanic whites in the same age group fell to 33.8 percent from 42.6 percent in 2000, according to census data released yesterday.

“All the institutions and services that affect children in Texas will need to really pay attention,” said demographer William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “These people may not yet vote but they will in the future. They’re going to be an important part of the electorate, and this will really put an exclamation point on that.”

The data confirm Hispanics are on pace to become the biggest ethnic group in the state by 2015, said Steve Murdock, a former U.S. Census director who teaches sociology at Rice University in Houston. A gap is forming, he said, between youthful Hispanics and aging non-Hispanic whites, known colloquially in Texas as “Anglos.”

Non-Hispanic whites now account for 68 percent of Texans 65 years and older, compared with Hispanics’ 20 percent share of that age segment, Murdock calculates.